Posts Tagged ‘new york ancestors’

The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) is in Boston and was founded in 1845.

That makes it the oldest and most respected non-profit genealogical society in the U.S. If you have been a member of NEHGS you know that they also have a great amount of material on New York State in their holdings.

The NEHGS has been publishing many free articles on their main website, NewEnglandAncestors.org which will no doubt give you some excellent reasons to become a member and to have full use of all of the online databases that they have to offer. Short of a trip to Boston, which you should schedule as soon as possible, the website is a great starting point and will lead you to databases that you never knew existed.

Well NEHGS has long had very nice collections of New York State materials also. What you say? New York is not part of New England.

Maybe so but the New Englanders followed the setting sun and guess where they arrived at first? Sure many went on to the upper mid-western states, but many stayed in New York. There was also quite a bit of interaction between the families that lived in the western counties of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, with the eastern counties of New York State.

So it is a natural thing to gather documents and manuscripts of New England areas that also included quite a lot of information on New York. One way to make this fact known to a larger audience was to create a new website named NewYorkAncestors.org and to bring information to people that might be helpful in researching their Yorker ancestors.

Yours truly was very excited a few months ago when one of the editors of the NEHGS website contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing a monthly article for NewYorkAncestors.org. Well, yeah! My what an honor to even be considered. Now I’m no Michael Phelps but I sure am proud to be included with the excellent authors on this fact filled website. My first article appeared this week and it is titled; “Getting to Know the Lay of the Land Using New York State Gazetteers.”

So please visit NewYorkAncestors.org and check out some of the great free information available. There are articles on a Case Study of Thomas Herring, Settlers of the Beekman Patent, The Erie Canal, Welsh Immigrants, NYS Census Records, NYS Vital Records, and many many databases that you will want to spend some time in.